Linux - Wireless NetworkingThis forum is for the discussion of wireless networking in Linux.

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I have followed a variety of leads to try and activate wireless on my T60p (Ubuntu). The most promising was to use ndiswrapper with the Windows driver for Atheros (the Windows XP installation which came with the machine lists ar5416.sys as the driver.

So I go through the procedure: install ndiswrapper, then unpack the driver, then issue
ndiswrapper -i net5416.inf

All that works fine.

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

FREEZE. Need to disconnect PS & battery to get out of it...

So I check /var/log/messages and find out that things stopped at "disable_irq..."

I set a tail -f on /var/log/messages and retry. Sure enough things stop at the same place. (see copy below)
ndiswrapper -l gives the expected listing.
ndiswrapper -m behaves OK.

I try again with tail, this time the process goes one step further, and freezes again.
Note that the last step shows an error.

Thanks for the pointer.
I had already looked up madwifi, but had not noticed the warning about DWA-645 version 1.02.
As it happens, Ihad used that one.
Now I have moved over to version 1.01, and the ndiswrapper installs fine.
HOWEVER (there is always one more bug...) whilw I can see wlan0 under iwconfig, I can't see it under my netwrok connections Icon. When I invoke system>Administration>Networking, I do see it, I can activate it (apparently), but a ping on anything fails. I an still not connected.

Thanks, 2Gnu.
In fact, as shown in the listing below, wlan0 was configured already.
But there is an IPv6 address and no IPv4 address, for some reason.
When I do dhclient, no response.
For confirmation, I did a dhclient on eth0, and the response was immediate.

Yes, I did try all your suggestions, no joy.
I want to restart from scratch, but I am not too sure how to remove all trace of previous activity.
Any suggestions?
Maybe there is some leftover from a previous attempt which gums up the works :-)

Also, I keep getting "Interface does not support scanning" whenever I try iwlist.
Any idea why?

To undo the ndiswrapper installation, cd to the directory where you unzipped the package - /home/your_home/ndiswrapper-1.34 for example - and as root, run make uninstall.

Then, make, make install.
Post any errors.

Copy both the .sys and .inf files for your card (and any .bin which may contain firmware) to some directory. cd to that directory and run, as root, ndiswrapper -i driver_name.inf
Post any errors.

Run, as root, modprobe ndiswrapper
Post any errors

Run, as root, ndiswraper -l
Post the output.

This is all in the INSTALL file that comes with the source package, if you want to use that as a reference.

Then, make sure the interface is there with iwconfig.
Bring up the interface (may be redundant, but sometimes helps) with ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig mode managed essid your_ssid, etc.
Check for association, then dhclient wlan0